When you run a Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE), you fill your life with equal parts reward and risk. Providing care for aging people who need it often provides a sense of purpose. Plus, there’s the job security as people will always get older and need support.
At the same time, though, operating an RCFE exposes you to the potential for incidents. If a resident slips or one of your team members mismanages their medication, you could find yourself in a sticky and expensive situation.
That’s why it’s so important to have the right insurance coverage in place for your RCFE. With policies to protect you, your team, and your facility, you can better enjoy the rewarding parts of running your facility.
Once you start paying for coverage, you want to make sure it offers the safeguards you expect. Here, documentation is key.
Why it’s so important to document incidents at your facility
Your RCFE’s insurance, particularly your liability coverage, steps in to defend you when things go sideways. If you find yourself facing a negligence lawsuit, for example, your liability policy can come to your aid, paying out for your defense.
For that to happen, though, you need to verify what actually happened in the incident. Without documentation, you lack the evidence that could bolster your side of things. And some insurers will even deny claims on grounds of poor documentation.
That makes record-keeping an critical asset for your RCFE. Make it a habit for your team to write things down or enter them into your system. Require documentation for:
- Accusations of improper care (from residents and visitors)
- Disputes
- Equipment malfunctions
- Incidents that didn’t result in injury (e.g., a resident slips but doesn’t get hurt from it)
- Injuries
- Medication irregularities (e.g., missed doses)
- Outbursts
- Unusual incidents
- Wandering episodes
In short, anything that falls outside of the norm at your facility should get captured. You might think you don’t necessarily want to capture errors on your end, like improper administration of medication. If you only capture the feathers in your cap, though, you could miss crucial evidence when a claim arises.
3 steps to document an incident at your RCFE
After something outside of the ordinary happens at your RCFE, have a team member follow these steps to capture a record of it:
1. First, make sure any affected residents, visitors, and/or staff members are safe.
2. Then, write an incident report, complete with:
a. The date
b. The names of everyone involved
c. The names of any witnesses
d. A detailed and fact-based description of what happened
e. Photo or video evidence, when possible
f. Information about what happened in response to the incident (e.g., medical treatment administered for an injury)
3. Finally, notify the appropriate parties. That’s often the resident’s family member or physician. If the incident is serious enough (e.g., a resident goes missing, they get seriously hurt) and affects a resident with an assisted living waiver (ALW), you also need to file a report with the California Department of Health Care Services within 24 hours.
Having a standardized incident report template makes it easier for your team to capture the information an insurance claim might require. Also, encourage them to fill it out as quickly as possible (ideally, immediately after the incident when their memory is fresh).
This is a fairly broad overview. For support getting both the insurance you need and the documentation practices to accompany it, contact our team at InsureMyRCFE at (805) 413-5668.
